When I first came to New York in 1979 as an aspiring photojournalist and assistant to then-Time photographer Neil Liefer, I met Carl Mydans while hanging around the 28th-floor photo stockroom, which was right next to the famed offices of the Time/Life photographers.

Just as I was getting prepared to go off to the Democratic Convention in Boston, I got last-minute e-mail from David Lyman, the director of the Maine Photo Workshop. He had a last-minute cancellation from an instructor who was going to teach a two-week Digital Video course, and he wanted to know if I could fill in.

The other day the esteemed and soon-to-go-into-semi-retirement NBC News anchor, Tom Brokaw, in what became an open letter, parts of which were in The New York Daily News, informed anyone who would listen that he is unhappy that the Commission on Presidential Debates had the audacity - and strength - not to choose him or any other big-name anchor to moderate the upcoming political debates.

I was most of the way through what I had intended to write when I started watching the Republican National Convention. I was so disturbed by what I saw and heard that I deleted what I had written and decided to start again.